Blick auf Schloss Chillon am Genfer See

'Blick auf Schloss Chillon am Genfer See' (View of Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva) depicts the famous medieval castle that projects on a rock into Lake Geneva near Montreux, a subject that had become the most iconic single image in Swiss Romantic landscape since Byron immortalized it in his 1816 poem 'The Prisoner of Chillon.' Sattler's version joins an enormous tradition of Chillon representations in oil, watercolor, and print, all addressing the castle's extraordinary visual situation: a complete medieval fortress standing in the lake, the Alps rising behind it, the blue water surrounding it on three sides.

The composition places the castle in its characteristic relationship to lake and mountain, the horizontal extent of the medieval walls reading clearly against the vertical backdrop of the Alps. Sattler renders the castle's grey stone with cool tones that contrast with the warm blue-green of the lake water, capturing the light quality of the Geneva basin in the afternoon hours when the mountains cast their long shadows across the water.